


i'm gonna be the one who's coming home to you

by Yavemiel



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Domestic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Gift Fic, Healthy Relationships, Post-Episode: s02e04 Meat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28450791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yavemiel/pseuds/Yavemiel
Summary: It's been a very long day, and Gwen is so happy to be coming home to Rhys.
Relationships: Gwen Cooper/Rhys Williams
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11
Collections: Torchwood Fan Fests: 2020 Holiday Exchange





	i'm gonna be the one who's coming home to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moonlightrhosyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlightrhosyn/gifts).



> Happy New Year moonlightrhosyn! This is part of the Torchwood Fan Fests: 2020 Holiday Exchange for the prompt: 'Gwen/Rhys, Gwen, Tosh and Rhys; Gwen and Rhys have a nice dinner planned but she is working on something with Tosh and gets home later than she'd planned, set after Meat so she gets to tell Rhys about her day and why she was actually late for the first time over dinner (she's very happy with being able to share things with him and talk to him about work)'.
> 
> Thanks moonlightrhosyn for this lovely, wholesome prompt, Gwen and Rhys together is one of my favourite dynamics, I had so much fun writing it and I really hope you enjoy it!

Back in her days with Cardiff’s finest, Gwen thought she knew what tired was. She worked long shifts, dealt with obnoxious drunks in bars, mainlined coffee and trudged through endless piles of paperwork.

With Torchwood though, Gwen has a new perspective on tired. Tired is when she's gotten four hours sleep in the last three days, but she's got to keep going anyway because her boss is dead (temporarily) and if she doesn’t save the day, then Cardiff will go down in flames and take the rest of the world with it. Tired is telling a weeping mother that unfortunately her son’s body was lost at sea, while knowing that it’s back on Owen’s slab with three extra limbs and she’s going to have to help with the autopsy.

And sometimes tired is when she picks up her coat to leave, on time for once, and her coworker goes “Um…” and she feels a wave of fatigue wash over her as she fumbles for her phone to text Rhys and tell him she’s going to be late for dinner. Again.

She turns to face Tosh, pasting a smile over her face as best she can. “Everything alright, love?”

Tosh looks wretchedly guilty and Gwen softens. “I’m so sorry, I wouldn’t ask, but that...thing...dripped acid on my motherboard, and I have to replace it and if I don’t get this done tonight, then the rift monitor will be screwed up for the next three weeks because we’re expecting a surge and I won’t have a chance to-”

“Tosh,” Gwen interrupts firmly, “it’s ok, I’ll help.”

“Oh,” she says, looking surprised and then grateful. “Thanks.”

“Give me two seconds to text Rhys,” she says, and she fires off a quick message.

_Sorry luv going to be late again, will get home asap_

The response pops up almost straight away.

_Saving the world stuff eh? No worries, i’ll put the spag bol in the oven. Gimme a text when ur on the way ya?_

It’s so different to the texts they’ve been exchanging for the past year, and she feels a little knot of worry in her stomach she hadn’t even been aware of unknot as she smiles down at her phone.

_Will do_

And then, before she puts her phone away.

_Love you <3_

She slides her phone into her pocket, and almost skips down the stairs towards Tosh, her energy restored. “Right then, where do you need me?”

***

It’s almost three hours later by the time she stumbles out of her car and up the stairs of the apartment block. Her brain is absolutely fried. It turns out that what Tosh had really needed was someone to hold a soldering iron steady and simultaneously read blocks of text from her notes as she transcribed them, and Gwen is going to have Greek symbols dancing in front of her eyes for the next month at least.

Tosh had given her a grateful smile as they left though, and now she has a girl’s night planned for next week, where they are both going to get very drunk and talk shit, and honestly, Gwen can’t wait. It’s been too long since she had a proper night out, and in the time that Jack was gone, she got to know Tosh better. Their resident genius has a wicked sense of humour and a killer karaoke voice to boot, and Gwen can’t believe she overlooked her when she first started: Tosh has become a close friend almost without her realising, and despite her exhaustion and the late night, she finds herself humming as she goes up the stairs.

She stumbles through the door. She hasn’t slept in 24 hours by now, courtesy of a rift incursion in Splott last night, and honestly, if she ever has a chance to talk to the council of alien overlords, she is going to ask them why (WHY) do they always choose Splott? It really doesn’t have that much to commend it to humans, left alone aliens, and hmm, it really is true what they say about sleep deprivation, it’s like being drunk.

She kicks off her boots tiredly, and dumps her leather jacket on the dresser by the door, keys in the bowl and god, she’s glad to be home. She traipses through to the living room, where she can hear the match on, and Rhys looks up and mutes it as she comes in.

“Hello love,” he says, “what’s occurring?”

She opens her mouth and then freezes. She has the old lies on the tip of her tongue. _‘Oh it was fine, you know, got caught a bit late, paperwork, the usual, the boss is a slave-driver.’_ Except, looking at him, she suddenly remembers something incredibly important.

She doesn’t have to lie to him.

“A fucking alien ship turned up in Splott, and when we brought the alien back to the Hub, it dripped acid on everything and killed Tosh’s motherboard,” she says, and Rhys stares at her. For a brief second her stomach drops as she tries to figure out how he’s about to react.

“In Splott?” he exclaims. "Why the hell would they land in Splott? There’s fuck all there, except empty lots where those real estate bastards say they’re going to build apartment complexes. I’m telling you, those developers are the real problem around here. Aliens might actually do something with the place, not leave it lying there like some kind of junkyard that...you alright, love?”

Gwen is doubled over, tears streaming down her face, caught somewhere between laughing and crying. She loves this man so much, and the relief, the blessed relief of finally having him fully back in her life, able to rant about her alien escapades as much as he had about shitty drunks and interminable paperwork, is overwhelming.

She can’t explain, and Rhys approaches her, concerned. “Are you hurt?”

She manages to calm herself, and wipes away the tears from her eyes. “No, I’m fine, I’m fine, I just...I love you, Rhys the Rant.”

“I love you too,” he smiles at her, a little bewildered, but happy to wrap his arms around her and accept the kiss she bestows on him, trying to pour all her affection and delight into it.

“I believe,” she says, pulling back a little, but staying within the circle of his arms, “that there was a mention of spag bol?”

He grins, and sweeps his hand towards their tiny kitchenette. “Why of course, if my lady could just make her way into the kitchen.”

She goes on tiptoe to press a kiss to his nose, and heads for the oven, glancing at him over her shoulder as she goes. “You maybe want to change that shirt, love? You know what happens when you eat spag bol in white.”

He flips her off, and gently hip checks her out of the way as he bends down to get dinner. “You worry about the plates, and I’ll worry about my shirt, yeah?”

In less than ten minutes, they have food on the island, and are sat with glasses of wine and massive plates of Rhys’s signature dish. Gwen gets a fit of the giggles as she watches Rhys try to carefully ferry spag bol from his plate to his mouth without dropping a morsel on his shirt, and he’s laughing in response, his hand shaking from it and coming perilously close to dumping the entire forkful down his front. He eventually darts his head forward and snaffles it without spilling a drop and then raises his arms in triumph, a muffled shout making its way through the food in his mouth.

A drop of sauce drops from the fork held aloft, directly onto his collar, and Gwen almost snorts wine through her nose she laughs so hard. Rhys looks at it, briefly crestfallen before shrugging it off and shoving the next mouthful in. It feels weirdly like a date, a night out they might have had back when they started dating, giddy with the joy of being in each other’s company, which transmuted over time into something a little calmer and more settled, though no less loving. It feels appropriate now though, a new chapter in their relationship, a more honest one, and Gwen can’t wipe the smile off her face.

“So,” Rhys says, slurping a piece of spaghetti off his fork. “How was work today? Save the world?”

She takes a moment to savour the novelty of being able to tell him the truth before she answers.

“Well, we went out to Splott because the rift spat out some kind of alien acid being onto a construction site out there,” she says, grinning as he snorts derisively at the mention of construction sites.

“What kind of alien was it?” he asks, leaning forward eagerly. “A little green one?”

“Not little, but it actually was green! Don’t meet as many green aliens as you would think, really,” she muses. “Anyway, it was actually dead, because it crash-landed, and even Jack didn’t know what it was.”

“Alien expert is he?”

“Just a bit,” she says, chuckling, thinking back to Jack’s fascinated face as he poked at it, and Ianto’s long-suffering one as he poured copious water over the acid burns. “And then we had to hang around while Ianto-”

“The quiet bloke in the suit?”

“That’s him,” she says, though privately she thinks that the description only applies if you haven’t gotten to know him yet. No one who’s heard Ianto’s biting wit could describe him as quiet. “He went back, got some acid resistant suits and a bag and we loaded it up into the SUV and took it back to the Hub, and got it inside.”

She starts laughing as she remembers what happened next. “And then Owen, our doctor, he tried to do an autopsy, with the alien still in the bag on the trolley, so we could see what killed it, but it melted through three scalpels before he found something that would work. He was so mad.”

Rhys is chuckling, even though she can see that he’s more laughing along with her because she’s finding it funny, and she feels another swell of affection towards him.

“Anyway, long story short, Owen took some samples of the acid for Tosh so that she could find out what the chemical make-up was, we’ve got some pretty fancy kit lying around, but one of the sample vials wasn’t the right material, and it melted right through it and onto a computer, and Tosh needed help to get it back up and running so that we can keep track of the Rift, and that’s why I was so late home tonight.”

“She asked you for help with computers?” Rhys asks, eyebrows raised.

“Oi now!” She gives him a light slap on the arm. “Less of that out of you, Mr. How-Was-I-Supposed-To-Know-The-Keyboard-Plugs-Into-The-Computer.”

He holds up his hands in defeat, and she takes a swig of her wine.

“Anyway,” she says, “she mostly needed me to hold her soldering iron and read equations.”

Rhys starts giggling into his wine glass, and she slaps him on the arm again, but she’s laughing too and the two of them end up giggling uncontrollably for what feels like ages. Gwen can’t remember the last time she felt so light.

They calm eventually, and the conversation turns to other things. Harwood's has taken on a new driver, and Rhys is concerned that he’s not going to be reliable enough to be trusted with the long journeys, as he’s consistently late for his shift. Traffic in the city centre is horrendous, because they’re bloody well digging up Castle Street again (she reassures him that no alien intervention has occurred). The price of milk in Tesco has gone up by 10p, which is a bloody outrage. It’s all mundane, everyday stuff, but it feels like it’s been forever since they’ve just talked like this, and Gwen soaks it all up, the feeling of completely sharing her life with the man she loves.

There’s a moment of silence, a natural lull in conversation, and Rhys yawns hugely, and starts grabbing the dishes and putting them in the sink. He rinses them off the way he never used to when they started dating, until she asked him to.

“Thank you,” she blurts out, and he turns to look at her, curiously.

“For what? It was only a bit of spag bol, not exactly Michelin Star,” he says with a chuckle.

“No...well, I mean yes, dinner, but just,” she waves her hands, helpless, unable to put everything she’s feeling into words, “everything. This was such a lovely evening, and I just...love you.”

His face softens, and she gets the feeling that he’s heard the things she hasn’t been able to say. He always does. She rounds the island and leans into him where he’s standing at the sink. He presses a kiss to her hair. “Come on, love. Let’s get you into bed. Gotta do it all again in the morning!”

She groans at the thought, but duly follows him to bed, where he wraps her up in his arms, and she sleeps contentedly the whole night through, and they do have to do it all again in the morning, but that’s ok.

She has Rhys.

_-fin-_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to gwendolyncooper for sending me a writing prompt on Tumblr that really got my creative juices flowing for this one!
> 
> Also yes the title is from The Proclaimers 'I Would Walk 500 Miles'.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, if you did, please leave me know in the comments, or come and yell at me on Tumblr where I can be found under the same URL. ^_^


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